CURRENT TEST SITES

THE ARCTIC: BARROW, AK

Our main test site, located at the Northernmost tip of the U.S. in the Arctic, is the home of our largest deployment yet. In 2017, we deployed our material on top of 17,500 square meters of ice. With our proprietary remote monitoring buoy, Jelly 2, we can track our how our material is performing from our lab in California and make sure that we're preserving as much ice as possible.

Our alternate test site, located near Minneapolis, MN, serves as a more easily-accessible location to pilot our autonomous deployment methods, monitoring buoys, and custom materials. This site is overseen daily by one of Ice911's PhD scientists and can also be tracked remotely from our lab in California.

PAST TEST SITES

While proving the effectiveness of our ice preserving materials in the arctic, we've also been pursuing other potential applications of our materials. One of these is the opportunity of using our material to preserve water in drought-stricken California, for which we began an all-weather experiment on small bodies of water at our lab in Sunnyvale, CA. Our results were extremely promising, and led to us seeking a larger reservoir to see if we could achieve the same remarkable results at a larger scale.

Serene Lake in the Sierra Nevadas served as a multi-year test bed in CA, where Ice911 is based. We pursued covering ice and snow with various types of sheets of the desired characteristics and determined that, though this was effective in ice and snow preservation it was excessively unwieldy and costly. We then began our work with bead-like materials placed over the ice, suitably contained. In addition, we learned valuable lessons about what data to collect and how to transmit information for remote monitoring.

With the help of Professor Christian Haas, a leading ice expert then at University of Alberta, Edmonton and our CTO of instrumentation, Satish Chetty, as well as our Founder, Leslie Field, Ice911 launched its first quantitative experiment at Lake Miquelon. The experiment proved invaluable in teaching Ice911 members about the intricacies of field testing in snowy northern conditions.

To move beyond the very first tests in small tanks on a sunny deck in the SF Bay Area, our first field test proved instrumental in validating the efficacy of using reflective materials to preserve ice. Using a scrappy approach that included hula hoops to hold reflective sheets over the ice, we found them effective, though susceptible to wind.